This page is about how to "call into" an existing DLL, using your mingw program. for information on creating your own DLL library, see DLL.

Usually (read: for all DLLs created with MinGW and also a few others) MinGW links fine against a DLL. No special import library is necessary (see sampleDLL).

However there are situations when it won't. Then one needs a so-called import library to help the linker. The rest of this page gives hints as to how to create such import libraries when there is only the DLL available.